Over There: Direct Mail in World War I

Early in the afternoon on Oct. 4, 1918, the lobby of Chicago’s Sherman Hotel was crowded with businessmen about to attend a trade convention. Many had fortified themselves with spirits, if only to ward off the Spanish Flu (which had killed more people in a month than all the German guns, according to an ad in that week’s Literary Digest.)

These men were the proud members of a one-year-old trade group called the Direct Mail Advertising Association(now the DMA). And they were about to face their first crisis.

Their chairman, Homer Buckley, had that morning received a letter from Dr. E.O. Merchant, of the War Industries Board, a wartime oversight agency. Pointing to vast paper shortages, Merchant suggested that U.S. business halt all advertising mail for the duration of the World War then raging, an action that would have put many of the men in the hotel lobby out of business.

Worse yet, the letter contained a message that would be repeated in many ways over the next nine decades—that ad circulars “tend to create an unfavorable impression in the minds of the persons to whom they are addressed rather than the opposite, and this raises the question of whether direct circular advertising actually pays under present conditions.”

Buckley and his fellow industry leaders debated this urgent matter over coffee and cigars that evening.

Now featured in the DMA Hall of Fame, Buckley was the co-founder of Buckley-Dement, a direct mail agency and lettershop equipped with all the best technology of the time—like multigraphs and envelope sealers—and women who could either type or hand-address envelopes. (“Neat writers only used by Buckley-Dement,” the firm promised.)

Buckley not only proselytized for the medium, some believed that he named it.

“To put it bluntly, the business world has suddenly awakened to the fact that it has been pouring water into a sieve,” he wrote. “It has been getting business at great expense through advertising and personal solicitation—and losing it by incompetent correspondence.”

Another future Hall-of-Famer sitting at the table was O.E. McIntyre, who 30 years later would found the enterprise known as Metromail. Though he had started at Sears, Roebuck (“I’m working at Sears, but don’t tell my mom—she thinks I’m playing piano in a call house”), he now worked for Charles Williams Stores, a retail chain and mail order house owned by the Arbuckle Sugar family. The 1919 Williams catalog would top 800 pages and offer everything from furniture to children’s shoes.

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